Margaret Fuller Slack I WOULD have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit, Chin re… - Edgar Lee Masters

As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish's burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
First his waving antennae, like straws of hay,
And soon his body, colored like soap-stone,
Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought
What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.

Do the boys and girls still go to Siever's
For Cider, after school, in late September?
or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
On Aaron Hatfield's farm when the forsts begin?
For many times with the laughing girls and boys
Played I along the road and over the hills
When the sun was low and the air was ool
Stopping to club the walnuts tree
Standing leafless against a flaming west.
Now, the smell of the autumn smoke,
And the dropping acorns,
And the echoes about the vales
Bring reams of life. They hover over me.

I tramped through the country
To get the feeling
That I was not a separate thing from the earth.
I used to lose myself
By lying with eyes half-open in the woods.
Sometimes I talked with animals…